Madikwe was awesome!

So I have to admit the last week has been a rough one. Ben and I spent four days last week bumming around his family's farm outside Mafikeng. His mom spoiled us with obscene amounts of food and we spent one day on a game farm where I caught a bat I had never seen before.

From Mafikeng, we headed to Madikwe game reserve for two nights. Madikwe is a massive reserve that has just about every animal found in southern Africa, including the Big 5 African species. We stayed in a ridiculously swank lodge courtesy of Ben's friend Dave, who works there as a game ranger. Each morning and evening, Dave took us out on game drives and in between we ate unbelievable meals and watched animals around the lodge's waterhole. My species list on this trip is long: elephants, lions, brown and spotted hyenas, nyala, rhinos, giraffes, dwarf mongoose, bush squirrels, snouted cobras, tree agama, countless antelope species, an exceedingly rare yellow-breasted form of the crimson-breasted shrike, and 35 new species of birds. I have hundreds of amazing pictures that I will upload when time permits, but I'm only back in Pretoria for one day before we head to the field to chase pangolins and check out Ben's field site at Tswalu.

A lot of you have e-mailed me in the past week or two and I haven't responded to anything. I'll try to get to the ones I can tonight, but don't expect too much communication from me until the middle of October.